Spike Magazine

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Review [published March 2000]
Leo Marks: Between Silk And Cyanide
Eugene Byrne
Leo Marks crops up in the oddest corners of the 20th
century. The only son of doting Jewish parents, his
father owned the bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road,
made famous by Helene Hanff’s book. Marks read his
Freud (who once visited the shop), wrote a lot of stories
and produced the brilliant/notorious script for Peeping
Tom, the film about a disturbed young man who kills
women with his camera and which virtually destroyed
the career of its director Michael Powell in the early
1960s. And look, here’s Marks again, providing the
voice of Satan in Powell’s chum Martin Scorsese’s
equally notorious film, The Last Temptation Of Christ.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that if you
think you don’t want to read Yet Another book about
secret codes in WW2, think again. To say that Between
Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s War 1941-45 is about
just codes is like saying that programmes featuring
Charlie Dimmock are just about gardening.
“In January 1942 I was escorted to the war by my
parents in case I couldn’t find it or met with an accident
on the way,” begins Marks’ funny, angry, intriguing
account of how, at a very tender age, he ended up
BUY Leo Marks books online from and
working for the Special Operations Executive (SOE),
the cloak-and-dagger operation set up by Churchill to
infiltrate agents into German-occupied countries and
“set Europe ablaze”. The trouble was that all these
agents had to communicate with England by wireless,
but that the codes they were using, as Marks quickly
figured out, were easy to break.
By his own account, young Marks was an insufferable
little smart-alec (he was compiling cryptic
crosswords for The Times when still a schoolboy). If,
he argued, he could easily break the SOE codes on his
own, all based on poems, then all the resources of the
German intelligence services wouldn’t find them much
of a challenge either. Marks’s job, as head of codes for
SOE, was essentially about devising new codes, then
persuading the powers-that-be to accept them, then
finding the personnel and resources (sheets of silk and
labs to photograph the codes onto them – silk was easily
sewn into an agent’s clothes and could withstand the
most assiduous frisking by German security-checks) to
produce them in the huge quantities required.
Marks spent his war sitting at a desk; an anonymous
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